The Value of Silence

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.

--Franz Kafka, "The Silence of the Sirens" ¹

Tragedy is a preliminary stage of prophecy.

--Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama ²

A Moment of Silence

What is the value of silence? And what is that value of silence from which it is impossible to escape?

In the initial aftermath of the tragedies of 11 September 2001, New York City was utterly silent. Immediately following the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers there appeared on the streets, in parks, in subway and train stations, on make-shift bulletin boards all over the city and its outlying suburbs hundreds, then thousands, of home-made posters for "missing persons" (Fig. 1). I am struck not just by the inescapable silence of these posters--the smiling and soundless faces of the thousands of "disappeared." ³ I am also amazed by the complete silence engendered in the crowds who gathered, and continue to gather, around these now public shrines to absorb their mute appeals.

Very quickly, this silence has been overtaken by noise. Through all this incessant and increasing noise, I continue to wonder and to worry about the place of silence, a place for silence. While initially emblems of hope, these silent posters of the disappeared are now for those who survive tokens of mourning, transitional objects, to use Winnicott's term, as hope evaporates into dread, and dread turns into grief. In this mute space, the shock of trauma slowly transforms into the reality of loss, and in this regard, silence might be considered that moment before--that liminal space from which--loss is expropriated into its symbolic meaning. Silence, then, is not the opposite of speech but, indeed, its very condition of possibility, the precondition of knowing and of meaning. But what, we must ask, will happen to this silence--to the silence of countless, inexpressible, and singular private tragedies--as it encounters a public language of mourning and is reduced to a state speech wholly inadequate to the inconsolable contours of its grief?

At the moment--it is a month and a half after the events of 11 September that I sit down to finalize this essay--collective calls of a US President and legislature for unity and tolerance within, and for war and retribution without, initiate a battle for "infinite justice" (subsequently redubbed "enduring freedom") with no ostensible conclusion and, hence, with no possible future horizon. ⁴ In its attempts to repress any reckoning with the future, the mania of nationalism incited by the politics of (state) mourning reduces the globe to an "us" and a "them," while producing a truly unprecedented New World Order of American sovereignty. You are with US or your are against US. In one and the same breath, this politics also works to obviate the potential of tragedy, as Benjamin provocatively suggests, to be a preliminary stage of prophecy. It does so precisely through the severing--the silencing--of the past.

Mourning and Melancholia

It is odd, Benjamin tells us in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, "that the Poetics of Aristotle make no mention of mourning [Trauer]as the resonance of the tragic." ⁵ Here, Freud's observations on the work of mourning [Trauerarbeit] provide an important occasion to work through the resonances of the tragic as a relation to history. In his 1917 essay, "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud attempts to draw a clear distinction between these two psychic states through the question of "successful" and "failed" resolutions to loss. He reminds us in the beginning of his essay that "mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country...